Actional Unleashes Web Services Watchdogs

Actional Corp. has announced new Web services performance and availability monitoring features known as "watchdogs" for its Web services management framework.

Actional Corp. has announced new Web services performance and availability monitoring features known as "watchdogs" for its Web services management framework.
Officials at the Mountain View, Calif., company said it has included the Actional watchdogs technology in its Actional Looking Glass Web services management server and console.
Actional, a Microsoft Corp. partner in the Web services management space, made its announcement at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas on Monday. The .Net version of the Actional technology is available now, and a Java versionJ2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)will be available in the second quarter of this year, Actional officials said.

Company officials said the watchdogs enable users to locate and ward off service interruptions with these new processes, which routinely check to make sure service is available and performing properly.

The watchdogs work with the Looking Glass management and policy server to create dummy transactions that ping a service to make sure it is available.
Meanwhile, if a particular service does happen to go offline or loses performance, the watchdogs send out alerts so that the problem can be addressed via a workaround or operator involvement.
In addition, working along with Actionals policy capabilities, the watchdogs can be set to help enforce policy by reporting situations or scenarios that violate policy.
Actional officials said users can centrally manage the Actional watchdogs from the Looking Glass console.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.